


Hearts of Stone

by Alchemine



Category: The Worst Witch (TV 2017), The Worst Witch - All Media Types
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-12
Updated: 2019-02-12
Packaged: 2019-10-26 19:39:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 963
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17752205
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alchemine/pseuds/Alchemine
Summary: How Hecate transformed from who she was into who she is. Spoilers for 3x07.





	Hearts of Stone

On the first night after the disaster, Joy lies awake in her tower room, eyes wide open in the dark. She doesn’t want to relive the sight of living flesh stiffening and calcifying into something inhuman, yet still familiar. The moon rises in the frame of her window like a round silver fish reeled in by an invisible line; it sinks again somewhere out of sight, and when the sky turns pale pink, she creeps outside, shivering without her cloak, which she has deliberately left behind. Why should she be warm when Indy is cold? 

The clearing is near the edge of the boundary imposed as part of her punishment, but if she's careful not to overshoot her mark (and she almost never does, rarely did even when she was first learning), she can transfer there instead of walking. She does it hoping that somehow, against everything she knows to be true, the spell may have broken on its own, but even before she’s finished materialising again, she knows it hasn’t. The stone girl is still there, face frozen in horror, arms raised with palms turned up as if pleading.  _Save me, Joy._

Round one of the statue’s wrists, there’s the outline of a friendship bracelet rendered roughly in granite, with just a suggestion of the pattern Indy showed her how to weave as they sat face to face on a bench. Indy had pulled the bag of tangled thread from her collection of plastic toys and trinkets with the same flourish she used for her pretend magic tricks; she'd told Joy she could have any colours she liked, but of course Joy had only wanted what Indy had. She would have liked bright happy clothes to match Indy's as well, but the bracelet was all she'd thought she could get away with, though in the end it had turned out even that was too much. 

Now she puts out a shy fingertip to touch Indy's bracelet, finds the stone arm ice-cold, and transfers again abruptly, before her gasp can turn into a scream. It's like touching a dead thing, or one of the dissected frogs in the potions lab; it's not like Indy at all, and yet it is Indy. This is what Joy has done to her. 

On the second night, it rains, and Joy keeps a wakeful vigil again, imagining the drops falling on the statue alone in its clearing, sinking into the thick mat of decaying needles and leaves at its feet, streaming down its dead stone face like tears. No one in the ordinary world will ever know what happened to Indy, she thinks, and wipes tears of her own away with the back of one hand. Indy has been erased: vanished forever from her proper place, soon to be forgotten as time and the world pass her by. Joy will grow up and Indy will not, and it's a burden so heavy that she feels she might have turned to stone herself. 

_Save me._

_I can’t._

On nights three to forty-nine, she sits up and reads, searching her schoolbooks in case there’s a counterspell she’s missed. When the fiftieth night comes, she gives up and turns to poring over the pages of the Witches' Code like a penance, reminding herself of the rules that were made to keep both witches and mortals safe. If she had followed those rules, Indy would still be alive, laughing and dancing, perhaps leading some ordinary girl to her secret hiding place to play games and tell secrets. How can Joy ever have another friend like that, knowing what she knows? Surely it's best if she keeps to herself from now on, to avoid hurting anyone else. 

With that thought in mind, she begins to detach, turning down invitations and sitting on her own at meals and shutting herself into her room early in the evening. At some point every day, she slips away to visit Indy, the way mourners visit graves, and like a mourner she gathers tributes to lay at Indy’s stone feet--chrysanthemums from the school’s garden and wild goldenrod from the edge of the wood, and then rose hips and ivy and eucalyptus when the flowers are gone. The foliage changes, but Indy stays the same, still reaching, still calling out a plea no one else can hear, and Joy ties her hair up so tightly it pulls and straightens her spine until it aches. And on the morning of the hundredth day, she wakes up sprawled facedown across her bed with a sharp corner of the Code digging into her cheek, and comes to a final decision.

She walks into the clearing for the last time on Joy’s feet, in Joy’s clothes. Indy is waiting for her, unmoving, hands up, and she realises for the first time that even in these few months, she’s grown taller; where she and Indy were once the same height (like twins, they’d proclaimed themselves; like sisters), now she’s eye level with the statue’s forehead, where a delicate green coating of moss and lichen is beginning to encroach.

_Save me, Joy._

“I can’t,” Hecate says softly, and undoes her pink-and-purple bracelet from her wrist. “I’ll never forget you. I’ll pay for my mistake every day of my life, and for a witch, that’s a long, long time. But I can’t save you. I’m so sorry, Indy.”

With sure fingers, she loops her bracelet round the statue’s wrist, over its stone replica, and ties the frayed ends of thread in a knot strong enough to withstand the wind and the curious beaks of birds. She leans in and kisses the cold cheek, lingering just a moment as if she might infuse some of her own warmth into it, and then she transfers away.


End file.
